


The very next day

by redgear



Category: Emily of New Moon - L. M. Montgomery
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:49:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27727700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redgear/pseuds/redgear
Summary: “I b’lieve you feel worse over leaving that cat than you do over leaving me,” sniffed Ellen.“Why, of course I do,” said Emily, amazed that there could be any question about it.It took all her resolution not to cry when she bade farewell to Mike, who was curled up on the sun-warm grass at the back door.“Maybe I’ll see you again sometime,” she whispered as she hugged him.
Relationships: Ilse Burnley & Emily Byrd Starr
Comments: 11
Kudos: 44
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	The very next day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pikkugen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pikkugen/gifts).



“Well, I call it the meanest, cruelest, most dod-gasted awful thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” Ilse said. Her eyes were sparking like a furious cat’s as she worked herself into a truly towering rage which for a moment took Emily aback. She hadn’t much experience in seeing Ilse in this state when it was directed _at other people_ rather than at herself, and it was the difference between being the last passenger of a ghost ship facing a hurricane alone and being tucked up safe in the glass cabin of a lighthouse watching the storm draw in. It made her feel curiously outside her own body, set just a breath apart from the world in a sensation that was disconcertingly not entirely unlike the Flash.

“--a slithering eel, just a vicious, lousy, cretinous ectotherm--!”

This was about the point at which Emily’s pride would get the better of her determination not to fight anymore with Ilse; about the time when her pride would unloose the knots on her tongue and she would say something quite as nasty (if perhaps less inventive) back, and they would stomp off, and Ilse would cool down, and Emily would promise to herself to keep a tighter rein on her pride and temper -- but Ilse wasn’t shouting at her, this time. --Well, to be sure, she _was_ shouting at Emily, because they were quite alone together in Lofty John’s bush, but she was shouting _about_ Aunt Elizabeth.

“It was a long time ago,” Emily offered slowly, when Ilse paused (either for breath or because the interrupted rhythm of this not-really-a-fight had thrown her off balance as well.) “And I -- I don’t believe she meant it to be cruel. Not -- not exactly.”

Ilse’s eyes flared the same snarling violent yellow of a wildfire, the unavoidable comparison tickling at something in the back of Emily’s memory. She pushed it down, hoping to recall it later.

“You’re a goose,” Ilse snapped, and actually stomped her foot as she hadn’t done for some months. “Emily Byrd Starr, what else do you think she meant by it? And to say as much when we’re standing here -- _here!_ ” Ilse didn’t gesture physically at the small feline grave that lay at the foot of the tree second to hand, but she didn’t have to. Emily felt it just as if she had done so. 

The fire flickered and dimmed between them as both girls glanced over to the spot where Mike II lay at rest, properly shriven. “Of course it was cruelty,” Ilse said after a moment, but she sounded more solemn now, grounded.

“She never liked cats,” Emily said. But the same fey, quickling breeze that had calmed Ilse’s rage had brought back to her an echo of the agony of those early days just after Father had died, when all she had had in the world was Mike and Saucy Sal, before Aunt Laura and before Ilse and Teddy and Perry. Of how unfair and cold and friendless the world had been when she’d had to leave Mike with Ellen Greene. Unfair, and cold, and friendless, but -- but not deliberately cruel. Not a slithering eel, or an - an ectotherm. “She didn’t understand, Ilse, that’s all.” 

Her voice didn’t shake, quite, but it was thin enough that Ilse gave her a sharp look and caught her up by the wrist. “We’re going home,” Ilse said.

Dr. Burnley was out on a house call when the girls arrived, but Ilse proceeded directly into his office as if he had been quite to home. Emily followed, still feeling half out of time and space, a feeling that did not relieve itself noticeably when Ilse sat down at her father’s desk and pulled out pen and paper as if it were as normal as anything. (And the paper-- Emily had a glimpse of it as Ilse closed the drawer, thick, creamy sheets of writing-paper stacked high as they would go, unshackled by bindings and as free as great white wings, cuddled up to the black-and-red metal beak of another pen--) 

It flew from her mind to her tongue in the barest instant, to ask shamelessly and ridiculously if she might borrow some -- some of _Doctor Burnley’s writing paper--_ but just as her lips parted, Ilse saved her from certain mortification by pointing her father’s pen directly at Emily and saying, confusingly, “Now, what was the name again?”

“Name?” Emily said, for a confused moment thinking Ilse was asking after the wild white paper crane she’d half-seen, then scrambling mentally back to the not-a-fight in Lofty John’s bush.

“Yes,” Ilse said, jabbing the pen at her again as if it were a rapier. “Do stay here in this world! How are we to get Mike back safely if you won’t-- oh, don’t look at me like that! You know very well I mean Mike the _first,_ Mike who you’ve only _just_ told me about this very hour, although you do a bang-up job of pretending to be a chum, I’ll tell you that--”

“Ellen Greene,” Emily said, forestalling the imminent accusations of serpenthood. “I -- I had to leave him with Ellen Greene-- at Maywood.” Her mind regrounded itself in a sudden rush. “Get Mike back?”

“If they won’t have him at New Moon,” said Ilse, restraining herself from calling Aunt Elizabeth a covetous crocodile (but only just) through means of furiously applying pen to paper, “We shall keep him here. You know Father will let me. Especially if it is for you - between you and me he would allow us a thousand cats.”

This was probably true, though Emily thought it would probably be rather more for Ilse’s sake than her own -- but she did not begrudge Ilse the discovery of her father’s love. “I haven’t written to Ellen in years,” she said instead, “not since those first few months I was at New Moon.”

“We shall write to her now,” Ilse said, who in point of fact had nearly filled the page already. 

Emily edged up to the desk to look over her shoulder at this missive and see whether the unfortunate Ellen Greene had become a quadruped or a pestilent cat-thief. But Ilse’s writing, though it sounded exactly nothing like Emily’s own old letters to the woman, was direct, to the point, and while not precisely polite, not directly insulting. “She has rheumatism,” said Emily meditatively, skimming across the bit where Ilse had (as Emily) inquired after Ellen’s health in a way that Emily the younger certainly never had done.

Ilse made an extremely rude noise, brushed the paper off onto the floor, and withdrew another sheet from the writing desk. “You might have said so in the beginning,” she said, and began again.

Mike the cat arrived some weeks later, borne in a repurposed picnic hamper by Dr. Burnley himself, who was torn between interest and amusement at being imperiously sent on this odd quest by his daughter. There was grayed fur about Mike's mouth, now, an older, wiser set to his jaw, but it was unmistakably Emily’s oldest friend.

He knew Emily at once, stepping down with dignified grace from the basket and going to twine between her feet. Before Emily bent to pet him, she glanced up just once at Ilse, and read in those satisfied yellow eyes the first _I told you so_ that did not dent a Murray’s pride.


End file.
